One of the stars of Naked is Katrin Cartlidge. You never heard of her? That's sort of how she wanted it. You might call her the anti-Hurley, because she did just about everything possible in her short life to assure that her talent would never be seen. She chose her projects discriminately, shunned commercial ventures, and appeared in "small" award-winning films like Breaking the Waves and No Man's Land, as well as Mike Leigh's films. Although no beauty, she might have been. She was not an unattractive woman. She was tall and lanky with nice bone structure, and she might have been sculpted into what we call beautiful if she had done a little nip/tuck work, but that sort of superficial posturing wasn't for her. She kept her bad teeth and her noticeably large nose. She deliberately chose to play some unsympathetic and obnoxious characters. She spoke in her natural unrefined accent, and she didn't gad about London in the social whirl. She was genuine. She was always praised as an indefatigable worker.

And then she died.

Katrin came down with flu symptoms in September of 2002, and ignored them because ... well ... because it just seemed like a flu.

It was pneumonia.

By the time she got to a hospital, the complications of blood poisoning had gotten beyond the point where the doctors could save her. And just like that, a few days after she seemed young and fit, she was gone.

At age 41.

Tubby's Drive-In is closing on Halloween night, 1965, the same night that a bunch of pledges are trying to get into a cool club, The Hollywood Knights. As the initiation ritual, the Knights drop their pledges off stark naked outside of town, and the newbies must wheel some auto tires through Watts and back to Tubby's before closing time. They must also get a local DJ to dedicate his last number of the night to Tubby's and the Knights.

This is an entertaining film which came between Animal House and Fast Times. Together those three iconoclastic films really kicked off the 1980s youthploitation era. "Knights" also featured many youngsters who went on to solid careers. Look for Fran Drescher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tony Danza and others as high school students. The star of the film is comedian Robert Wuhl, whose rendition of "Volare" and the "Words to Lawrence of Arabia" are not to be missed.

The DJ dedication device, coupled with the many scenes at Tubby's, allows the filmmaker to play the top-40 hits of the era non-stop throughout the movie, so the film perfectly evokes an October night in the year I was a high school senior myself. I find it to be one of the most nostalgic "after high school - then what" films. But of course that's because I was a major fuck-up, just like the Hollywood Knights.